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What To Look For In A Good Hosting Provider

Choosing a good hosting provider

It’s a problem that anyone about to start a new website always faces, you just never know if the hosting provider you choose is a good hosting provider or not.

If you are new at this and do not have enough information about the different types of hosts out there and how to differentiate between a good hosting provider and a bad one, this could be a very annoying process, yet it is perhaps the most important step you’ll take towards building your website since everything depends on having a good hosting provider.

I faced this problem when I first started making websites back in 2009, I picked a hosting provider based only on price, thinking that it wouldn’t matter that much, had I known what I know now back then, there is no way I would’ve went for the cheapest host.

When Choosing a Good Hosting Provider, Don’t Go For The Cheapest!

That awful cheap hosting provider was “FatCow”, not only was my website down almost every 2-3 days for sometimes an hour, their customer service support is almost non existent, and when you do reach them after the long que, they tell you they will escalate the problem to their “Technical Team” since they can not solve it on the spot, and it was very basic and simple problems that they should be able to solve on the spot, but it seems that the people that they hired to answer your live chat have no idea about anything else except sending your problem to someone else.

So to make this post shorter I left “FatCow” after spending 1 year with them and started to look for a new good hosting provider, only now I know what to look for.

What Do You Need To Know When Choosing A Good Hosting Provider?

Here is a list to help you in your search for a good hosting provider:

1) Customer Service:
The reason this is number 1 is because by contacting customer support you will be able to tell a lot of things about the company!

Any good hosting provider have an online live support.

Make sure you are easily able to find them on the homepage and check to see what happens when you contact them, if they take a long time to answer or don’t answer at all, then they are not a good hosting provider.

Check to see how long it takes for them to respond to your requests and answer your questions, also check to see if they are friendly or not. A good hosting provider hires people that are not only experts at their fields but are also capable of being friendly to others, especially to their clients.

2) Reliability and Speed:
To be considered a good hosting provider they must have a reliable service and acceptable loading times for the websites of their clients. You cant have people waiting 10 seconds to load your page. Also make sure the listed up time is at least 99.9% Sometimes they will state 99% but that is actually too low and means that they might go down a few times per week. A hosting company with a 99.9% of up time might go down but not very often, and only for a brief moment, so a host with 99.9% up time is considered a good hosting provider.

3) Data Transfer (Bandwidth):
Whenever a visitor visits your website, the amount of bytes transferred from your website onto the visitors computer, is called Bandwidth Usage. What this means is that every time someone visits your site, they are loading files that you put on there, and also using your bandwidth to display your site on their computer. You are only allowed a certain amount of bandwidth per month and if you have a lot of visitors and run out of bandwidth your website will simply not load anymore.

Solution: If you have a new website you don’t have to worry very much about bandwidth simply because you don’t have much traffic yet, so just to be safe, choose web hosts that offer “Unlimited Bandwidth”. Of course this doesn’t mean that it really is unlimited, everything has a limit, but at least it will be enough for a new website. Later on when you start to get heavy traffic you should consider getting dedicated hosting, which costs more but you pay according to what you use.

In all cases though, a good hosting provider will always state that they have unlimited bandwidth, otherwise don’t even bother looking at the rest of their website.

4) Disk Space:
This refers to the amount space your have to put your files on. Normally a new website will not need to take more than 10mb unless of course you’re going to upload lots of files on there with a large size such as video files and software. When a web host states “Unlimited Space” means you have a lot of space but it’s not really unlimited, there is a limit and you can find out about it by contacting them. For a new website choosing a host with unlimited space should be enough to get you started.

Why I Choose HostGator As My Hosting Provider, And Why Do I consider It A Good Hosting Provider?

I tried a few other hosting companies after FatCow and I found that HostGator is by far the best one I have come across.
HostGator gives you all the above features, but the best thing I love about them is their customer support.
Their Customer Support Offers:

Fast-Response Customer Support.

24/7 Support anytime you need.

True professionals handle any problem you may have and as fast as possible.

This blog is currently hosted on HostGator, and it has never went down. Their up time is 99.9% and it never up to now went down once.
I highly recommend choosing Host Gator for your web hosting needs.

If you know of another good hosting provider or would like to share your experience with HostGator please feel free to do so in the comments below.

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I'm a Computer Science Major at York University (Toronto). I Love programming and creating websites, my goal is to one day have my own set of Plugins/Themes created from scratch, for now I'm focusing on learn about SEO and Blogging. :)

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11 thoughts on “What To Look For In A Good Hosting Provider”

Thank you, I’ve just been searching for information about this subject for a while and yours is the best I have discovered so far. However, what about the conclusion? Are you sure in regards to the supply?

As with any company the first thing you should check is the support – specially the after sales support. This will save you a substantial amount of your money and time – specially when an issue arises. Also, speed is really very important. I just read an infographic entitled “Instant America” last night that stated that 1 in 4 people abandon a web page that takes more than 4 seconds to load – imagine that!Reese recently posted..Blue Cash Preferred Review: Worth the Annual Fee?

Hi Sayyed,
Thanks for pointing out the disadvantages of cheapest host because many newbies are attracted by cheap host at first stage and later they find out its drop-x.Thanks for recommending HostGator, its a reliable host.Syeda Mehwish recently posted..Webhosting Plans

Finding a reliable web hosting provider often means insuring a successful start for your on line business. Fortunately there are many review sites that can offer you incredible amount of information about hosting providers: prices, plan features and of course customers reviews. But how can one determine if a review site is genuine and contains unbiased reviews? First sign if reviews are genuine is whether or not there are negative reviews in the mix, if that is the case the review site is most likely unbiased and genuine.Andreas Pazer recently posted..5 Reasons Blog Marketing is Effective